Unbury Carol(20)

Nor so alone.

Among her memories and her mind’s eye, bad connections were made. Dwight’s behavior had been changing: He’d become mean like a dog becomes mean; the clipped manner in which he spoke, and the inordinate amount of time he’d begun sharing with the woman Lafayette. The wrinkled Trail-watcher was known for her shady dealings, her dismissal of all things polite and kind. Carol, in charge of all the Evers business affairs, had sworn off working with the woman long ago. And yet Dwight was drawn to her. Not sexually, of course not, Lafayette was about as appealing as a mother pig, and yet…drawn to something. Carol, falling, understood that she should have paid more attention to this, should have wondered at the things, and people, that had begun to attract her husband’s attention and time.

Moxie.

The name returned with a deafening clap but did nothing to calm Carol’s electrified nerves. For the deeper she fell, the farther she felt from being able to do anything about any of this at all. And the name of an old lover only added to the confusion, the warped shadows, of Howltown.

Dwight.

Lafayette.

Burial.

Moxie.

The way Dwight spoke, it was as if James was on his way. As if he knew she was not dead.

Carol, scared as she was, was still intuitive enough to know that Dwight must have received a telegram. But the question that burned white among so much black was: How had James heard of her “death”?

Carol imagined she fell past posters that described her “sudden” death. Posters hanging in every business in Harrows.

    CAROL EVERS—DEAD



An announcement must have been made. Perhaps funeral plans as well. James got word that way, through the uncontainable spreading of bad news, and then…

…then what?

In the complete darkness, falling, black wind by her ears, Carol recalled James as he was, before he took to the Trail. Before he made the cruel decision to leave her behind, to leave love behind, too afraid to face the work of it.

Pigs, Carol thought. It felt good to think it. And while she had put these bad feelings behind her many years ago, the past had a way of slithering into Howltown.

No sheriff in here. No laws, either.

Again, Hattie’s voice:

You can’t rely on anybody else, Carol. Not when you’re inside a place nobody else can go. You must find peace in there. Or rage. Either way, your own. And then? Then maybe you can act on it.

Her husband was trying to kill her and an old dismissive lover was riding to check up on her too late. If ever she could be excused for lack of peace, this was that time.

Moxie.

She’d heard more than just Dwight’s voice, too. The ceiling had been creaking for many minutes—though time was difficult to track in the coma. How many people were upstairs? And did anybody, any one of them, wonder as to where she was?

This is your wake. John Bowie’s voice. The truth.

This resonated. Huge. A volcanic eruption of more shadows.

Was anybody up there who might help her? Anybody prone to suspicion?

Sheriff Opal! Carol called but her lips did not part.

Possibly Harrows’s beloved sheriff was standing a floor above her, kindly paying his respects for a woman who was not dead.

The anger Carol felt at this thought was strong enough to momentarily dull the nerves.

Hattie would’ve been proud.

Hattie, she thought, her thoughts like muffled voices. John. Help me. Tell me how to move. Tell me how to stop falling. Give me a hundred more theories to go with the hundred you already gave me. Maybe one will work…one must work!

Oh, how Carol wanted to crawl out of Howltown! How she wanted to climb the steps to the kitchen, take the hall to the parlor, present herself, as the darkness of the coma clung to her in pieces like mud to the body of the unearthed dead.

Not dead! she would say, just as James had written to Dwight. Not dead. And the expressions of grief would fall from the faces of the grievers, and Sheriff Opal would quietly take Dwight’s wrist in his hand.

Of the many experiments Hattie conducted on an adolescent Carol was one she called the Object Light. When Carol went under, Hattie would light a solitary candle and stand in one corner of the room for five minutes, then stand in another. Then she’d bring it a step closer. Five minutes spent at each spot in the room, as Carol lay deadlike on the floor. When Carol woke, Hattie would ask her if she’d seen it, the light, at any point in the fall. If she had, Hattie theorized, if there was a certain angle, perhaps a spot, that showed in the darkness, they could build upon that knowledge.

But there was no light in Howltown.

Never.

John Bowie had ideas, too.

Since Howltown is an abstract place, have you considered simply…imagining a door?

This way of thinking best defined the difference between Hattie’s hard-nosed we can build you stairs in there and John’s spiritual “kinesis.” And while both were trying to help—always, always—neither worked any better than the other.

Yet Carol tried.

She tried to remember a time when she and James Moxie were very young, teenagers off the Trail, when it felt as if, together, they could keep the comas at bay.

James, she believed, lived in Mackatoon these days. And as she fell deeper into the darkness, as the winds whispered of silence and death so close to her ears, Carol understood that whether or not he was coming, Mackatoon was a two-day ride.